not a huge change to get the Phenom I that high, There was a major flaw in those CPUs, hence they had a quite low clockspeed I would say if u really want to keep having AMD try the Phenom II X4 980 BE, it's not that expensive anymore and imo it's quite a decent cpu for atleast the games I played.

This thread may seem old but I'm having a same problem with and without some speedhacks..

I'm playing Star Ocean 3 or even Tekken 5, tried different games and I'm running an AMD Zambezi 8-core slightly overclocked to 3.9ghz, a GTX 550ti fermi card with no overclocking and it seems that I still have some frame loss during various cutscenes/segments of the game... I'm running 8gb of DDR3 memory OC'ed to 1600mhz.... Any help would be awesome.